


Correspondence

by smilebackwards



Category: Chess (Board Game)
Genre: Anthropomorphic, F/M, Multi, Off-screen death, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-25 13:34:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2623571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>King Ivor sends a dove with a smirking message: <i>Your eastern castle will be naught but rubble by nightfall.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Correspondence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [polishmyarmor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/polishmyarmor/gifts).



> Sorry this veered a good deal more toward _drama_ than humor. I hope it meets the rest of your prompt enough to be enjoyable!
> 
> Many thanks to vyctoires for the beta. Remaining mistakes are my own.

King Ivor sends a dove with a smirking message: _Your eastern castle will be naught but rubble by nightfall._

“Arrogance,” Jet huffs, crumpling the missive and tossing it into the hearth. Still, he believes it. Can picture Queen Blanche with her pearl-handled sword, leading her knights to victory over the poorly defended eastern flank. He could respond that Ebony is even now cornering both of Ivor’s bishops, foolishly come together for the High Holy Day, but he is a king, not a fool. Such information should never be given freely, for the fleeting satisfaction of gloating over one’s enemy.

Jet supposes he invited this puerile correspondence by stooping to reply to Ivor’s last sally. But they had been no empty words. _Look to your losses in the black marshes_ had led Jet to find two of Ebony's best soldiers dead in the shallows, the distinctive electric taint of the White Knight's cold magic hovering over them. Jet had closed Nuit's empty eyes. Nuit's eldest son was serving in Ebony's vanguard; Jet would need to send word. Sable left a young widow. Her long, dark hair floated gently in the water, twining around her neck like a noose. 

Jet put a hand on the nose of his snorting black charger and looked out at the copses of twisted blackwood trees growing out of the marshes, the stagnant surrounding water absorbing the pale moonlight. It was an ugly place to die.

He cut down a white scouting party on the banks of the river on his way back to the safety of the palace. Whistling a raven down from the treetops, Jet had fastened a note around its leg before launching it toward the horizon. _An eye for an eye._

Ridiculous, he knows now, to have thought it would cut Ivor the way Nuit’s dead eyes cut him. To Ivor, soldiers were only pawns. Jet imagines he laughed and pulled out his quill. The letter about the castle followed swiftly.

Jet fingers the knife Ebony gave him as a courting gift, years ago, when he still felt almost young: an onyx blade with a hilt made of bone. He and Ebony do not have the grand love story of Ivor and Blanche—the callow prince who went to rescue a damsel from a dragon only to be rescued in turn; they were showered with rose petals when Blanche galloped Ivor’s horse back through the city gates with Ivor clinging on behind her, laughing wildly—but there is a respect, a warmth and kinship alongside the duty. There is nothing he would not do for queen and country.

Jet’s family was from the grey borderlands. They grew wheat and barley and when Jet was seventeen, the white army cut through their farm like his father’s scythe through chaff. There was smoke in the sky as he rode back from the village to find his father and sister laid out beside the carcasses of the livestock. Albina had been not yet fourteen. When the thunder of hooves bore down on him, Jet, hands clenched in the burned and salted earth, had prayed for a sword through the heart.

Instead, two booted feet had appeared and he’d looked up to see a whipcord of a girl, with eyes sharp as chips of obsidian and a silver coronet surmounting her dark hair. Ebony, to the pride of her people, had been crowned queen at only sixteen, after her mother and father had fallen one after the other to the black death.

“Get up,” she said quietly. “Do not give them the satisfaction.”

Jet doesn’t know what Ebony saw in him, but after she helped him bury his dead, she’d put him on the back of her horse and galloped them to the palace at breakneck speed. They’d married five years later in the barren depth of winter. Ebony shone like the black diamonds that came out of the southern mines waiting for Jet at the end of the aisle. 

It was two more years before snow fell on the kingdom for the first time since the Grey Wars, a swath of white as far as the eye could see. The court stirred with unease at the ill omen and their fears were proven quite violently when half a score of soldiers from the border patrol returned on biers instead of horses.

Ebony laughed and kissed him when Jet offered to follow her and the army to the north. “What use is victory in conquest when the homefront is not defended?” she said, climbing onto the back of her half-wild stallion without assistance. “I will bring you Ivor’s head on his shield.” 

Jet handed up the two-handed broadsword Ebony wielded as if it was light as a feather. “I’ll be waiting.”

 _How fares your western bishop?_ Ivor sends, undeterred by Jet’s silence on the matter of the eastern castle. Jet’s own men carried word after the shellings were over, limping back dejectedly with tales that no two stones remained standing together. Jet had brought the royal physician for the wounded and sent the soldiers whose eyes snapped with anger to bolster Ebony’s forces on the northern front.

The taunt about Bishop Cole is a hollow one and Jet takes little notice. Cole is a charismatic leader, surrounded by priests who would throw themselves on Blanche’s sword to protect him. When it comes time for the Michaelmas rites, those near the border are known to sneak guiltily from the east to the Church of the West to celebrate. 

Jet suspects that Ivor is lashing out blindly, burnt by Ebony’s capture of both his own bishops. Blanche will have little time to harass the west when Ivor is on his heels, fleeing from Ebony’s swift advance. 

He wonders if Blanche has noticed Ivor’s perilous position. Ebony is fiercer than any dragon Ivor once failed to slay and Blanche may sound the retreat, may make her way through Ebony’s rearguard, but she won’t be fast enough. 

Jet waits until Ebony’s victory is assured: her sword at Blanche’s neck, her knights forcing Ivor to a corner. Then he sends a raven back, to salt the wound. _Checkmate._


End file.
